Team

For enquiries on the Spark framework, or to discuss commercial usage of the Spark framework, deployment and customisation, please contact the Spark mailbox.

Current team members

Dr Vincent Lemiale

  • Dr Vincent Lemiale is a Research Group Leader for the Natural Systems Modelling group at Data61, where he conducts research on the application of computational modelling to natural hazards and complex systems. He has extensive experience in computational modelling methods including finite element schemes, particle-based techniques and agent-based models.

Dr Mahesh Prakash

  • Dr Mahesh Prakash is a Senior Principal Research Scientist at CSIRO Data61 and leads a group of Scientists, Engineers and Software Professionals who develop and apply a diverse range of modelling and analytics techniques for urban environmental applications with a key focus on emergency and disaster management. His scientific and technical interests are in urban flood modelling, geospatial big data analytics and the confluence between environmental research (including climate change and climate change related risk) and technology including how an integrated approach could be applied to resolving some of the intractable challenges associated with deploying these tools for real world applications.

Dr Andrew Sullivan

  • Dr Andrew Sullivan leads the CSIRO Environment’s Bushfire Behaviour and Risks team. He has been involved in bushfire research since joining CSIRO in 1991. He has a background in applied physics and computing and completed a PhD in competitive thermokinetics and non-linear bushfire behaviour at the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering in 2008. He has been involved in a wide range of research projects, including the design of fire danger prediction systems and software and the study of the behaviour of forest fires.

Will Swedosh

  • William Swedosh works at CSIRO as a senior engineer. William obtained his Bachelor’s degrees in Science and Mechanical Engineering from Monash University. Before joining CSIRO in 2015, William worked as an engineer in the offshore and mining industries, developing his skills in modelling and simulation, programming, and software development. William has worked in the bushfire space since 2015, both modelling bushfire and the impacts they have on people and the built environment. William’s current work focuses on the development and testing of the Spark framework as well as working on other bushfire related projects.

Richard Hurley

  • Richard Hurley is a senior technical officer in the CSIRO. He has 22 years’ experience supporting innovative science, specialising in bushfire research for the last 15 and has 10 years’ experience in structural & wildfire firefighting with the Country Fire Authority. He has a keen interest in the mechanisms of fire behaviour, propagation & weather dynamics. He is also highly experienced in effective data collection from fire grounds, often responding to undertake this work at short notice. He was heavily involved in the post fire reconstructions of four of the major Black Saturday fires and has also worked on high impact fires in New South Wales gathering field data for real time spread predictions and house loss investigations.

Dr Matt Reeves

  • Matt joined CSIRO in 2024 as a Senior Research Scientist in the Geospatial & Environmental Modelling Team of CSIRO Data61. His research interests are in the areas of computational physics, fluid dynamics, and turbulence. Prior to joining CSIRO, Matt was a Research Fellow at the University of Queensland, where he worked on superfluid hydrodynamics in ultracold atomic gases and thin film helium-II. Matt’s current projects involve the development of ember transport and fire-atmosphere interaction models, and their incorporation into the Spark framework.

Bella Robinson

  • Bella Robinson is a Senior Software Engineer with CSIRO Data61. She joined CSIRO in 1995 after completing a Bachelor of Information Technology with Honours degree at James Cook University. Her recent work has involved visualising climate and bushfire modelling outputs in a web-based environment. Previous research areas include intelligent transport systems, spatial information systems, scalable vector graphics, health data integration, web service integration and social media analysis.

 

Pawan Deegoda Gamage

  • Pawan Deegoda Gamage is a Software Engineer at Data61. Pawan obtained his Master of Information Technology degree from Swinburne University of Technology and Bachelor of Science degree in Software Engineering from Curtin University. He has been mainly involved in building web based decision support systems for bushfire evacuation in Australia. Pawan’s main focus areas are geospatial engineering, web-based hazard management systems and cloud integrations

Dr Nikhil Garg

  • Dr Nikhil Garg is a postdoctoral fellow within the Natural Hazard and Infrastructure team in Data61 CSIRO. Prior to joining Data61 in 2017, he was a PhD student at School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University where he studied the effects of air-sea interaction on hurricane using a coupled atmosphere-ocean-wave model. His current interests include application of computational methods for modelling natural hazards such as flooding and bushfires and coupling of Conformal Cubic Atmosphere model with the Spark and Swift frameworks.

Past team members

Natalie Clark

  • Natalie has extensive experience working across the public and private sector, both in Australia and overseas. Specialising in project delivery, Natalie currently manages a range of work that aims to achieve impact through multidisciplinary research in digital and data sciences.

Laura Guillory

  • Laura Guillory is a geospatial software engineer within the Natural Systems Modelling team within the CSIRO Data61 business unit. She completed a Bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering from Griffith University, and completed an industrial placement honours project on the auto-generation of web UIs for the consumption of RDF data. Her main research focus is on agricultural spatial analysis and modelling, spatial information systems, and developing computational tools.

Lachlan Hetherton

  • Lachlan Hetherton is a senior software engineer in the Decision Sciences program in Data61, and is one of the lead developers of the Workspace scientific workflow framework. Specifically, he is responsible for Workspace’s 3D scene rendering and 2D visualisation capabilities, as well as a number of extension plug-ins and applications, such as the NetCDF plugin.

Dr James Hilton

  • Dr James Hilton is a senior research scientist in the Data61 business unit in CSIRO. He joined CSIRO in 2007 as a Postdoctoral Fellow. Prior to this, he was a postdoctoral researcher working in the Complex Systems group in Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. His research interests are in the fields of applied computational fluid and solid dynamics. His projects involved the development of the propagation model within the Spark framework, as well as research into the fundamental behaviour of fire propagation.

Sam Nelson

  • Sam is a Research Technician in the Biosecurity Risk team in Data61. He started as a cadet through the Indigenous Cadetship program in 2017, and has been working full time since. Sam’s work predominantly revolves around visualising data, in the form of web applications.

Dr Stéphane Mangeon

  • Dr Stéphane Mangeon was a CERC postdoctoral fellow in the Model-Data Fusion team in CSIRO Data61. Prior to joining CSIRO in 2019, Stephan received a PhD in Space and Atmospheric Physics from Imperial College London and the UK Met Office, building a fire module for climate models. Stephan subsequently worked with the UN-WMO and Singapore-MIT (SMART) on South-East Asian Haze events, then in Data Science and AI in Singaporean start-ups. In CSIRO, Stephan worked on Data Assimilation frameworks for count data and on bushfire risk mapping for commercial clients.

Claire Miller

  • Claire Miller worked at CSIRO as a graduate fellow in the Digital Productivity flagship. Claire obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Computational Engineering from the University of Adelaide, during which she completed an honours project on the application of a coupled wildfire-atmospheric model. Her work focused predominantly around the development of geospatial and data processing algorithms, as well as development and testing of the Spark framework.

Chris Rucinski

  • Chris Rucinski is a software engineer in CSIRO Data61’s Computational Modelling Group based at Clayton, Victoria. Chris’ primary role is as a developer on the Workspace team with a strong interest in user experience design. Using Workspace as the development platform, Chris collaborates with a broad range of CSIRO teams to develop software products that model bushfires, hydraulic fracturing, ecology, mining and metallurgy.